Waxy.org is the sandbox of Today, a video's making the rounds of a Southern California car chase that jumped from the TV to real life, giving one young man a front-row seat to the action.
I was curious to see if the video was matched up to the local TV news broadcast, so I synchronized the two videos side-by-side to see. The results are below (view full screen):
There are two versions in the video. First, synchronized to the TV broadcast on screen, and second, to real-life events.
Note that the TV broadcast is exactly ten seconds behind real-life, with the news station operating on a ten-second delay. Live news commonly uses a five- to ten-second delays for unpredictable live coverage, like the recent car chase that ended in suicide accidentally broadcast by FOX News.
As much as I was hoping to debunk this, it appears to be real (or a particularly convincing fake).
1:35 PM
I spent a long time looking at this, looking at the fence, angles, etc. The 10 second delay confuses the issue, but you can clearly see the dude's legs moving with the window in the helicopter video (0:44 in your vid) as he walks from one room to the other just after the car turns.
What a funny thing for us to get excited about. But I am.
1:42 PM
So cool. You can definitely see the guy!
8:28 PM
It's real. It all syncs up, including his movement. Both videos show the same intersection and the same car movements.
It is filmed from within the Value Inn Worldwide on the corner of West Century Blvd and S Rosewood Ave.
Google Maps overhead view.
View of the hotel, in which some trees from the video can be seen.
10:57 AM
Thanks, Mark!
5:20 PM
I sent the link into a special R&D lab at the Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies and they were able to explain it:
http://youtu.be/56nxYwjsJfY?t=1m2s
7:01 PM
Great work on the sync!
Just listening to the news commentator, he says things like "going through the same lights again" "opposite side again" "this familiar pattern", so you can kind of guess the driver was repeating the same route and same driving habits.
The cameraman just had to wait for the driver to come around again, and he did ;)